Take it from the Hulk.
As I’ve been pointing out, we are under renewed attack by a new wave of climate denial, and energy disinformation, as the fossil fuel industry understands that its power is under existential threat.
Launched Tuesday by the nation’s top fossil fuel interest group, the Lights on Energy campaign will work to “dismantle policy threats” to the sector, the American Petroleum Institute (API) CEO, Mike Sommers, told CNN in an interview this week.
The ad blitz – which uses images of farm vehicles, footballers under floodlights and concert goers holding phones lit up – comes after US oil production reached a record high in 2023, which was also the hottest year ever recorded.
“We’re already moving in the wrong direction on fossil fuels,” said Timmons Roberts, professor of environment and sociology at Brown University. “They want to push us further.”
Roberts said the new ad blitz is rife with the kinds of “discourses of climate delay” that the fossil fuel industry commonly uses to thwart climate action, as documented in a 2020 study he co-authored on the topic. A video ad posted on Tuesday, for instance, says “demand for energy is growing and so is the need for American oil and natural gas”, positioning the sector as essential to continued human flourishing – a form of discourse Roberts and his co-authors call an “appeal to wellbeing”.
In his CNN interview, Sommers said clean energy can currently only play a limited role. “Renewable sources have a role to play, but oil and natural gas will be needed for decades,” he said.
And you ask me why I’m always angry?
We can always rely on Hollywood actors to support one goofy idea or another. AGW is quite the whopper…. a total scientific fraud both denying the scientific method and causality itself. You have to be quite deluded (or intellectually lazy) to give it any credence.
Eh? “AGW is … a total scientific fraud … denying causality itself.” How about if you fill us all in with details. Readers certainly need to learn more about your opinions.
Sure. No problem. From my paper (“10 points that disprove AGW”), point #3:
[quote]
CAGW violates causality. Over all time frames warming is first, then CO2 rises.
Causes don’t happen after effects, do they?
Koutsoyiannis et al., 2023 “Clearly the results […] suggest a (mono-directional) potentially causal system with T as the cause and [CO₂] as the effect.
Kauppinen and Malmi, 2023 “This is the proof that the temperature change is the major cause of CO2 increase, not vice versa.”
Also see: Humlum et al., 2013, Koutsoyiannis and Kundzewicz, 2020, Koutsoyiannis et al., 2022).
One doesn’t need more than being disproven by the scientific method and violating causality to completely dismiss AGW, much less CAGW (catastrophic anthropogenic global warming)…..
[end quote]
Note: lack of experimental proof is my point #2.
That’s a good list of very bad arguments. I’ll borrow one of the worst to illustrate the point. The basic experimental proof shows that CO2 absorbs and re-emits IR (infrared light). Radiation from the surface is (broadly) moving up, but the reemission is random, so when CO2 absorbs an IR photon on the way up, it re-emits the energy in a random direction. Earth’s radiation is mostly IR (very little of our planet is hot enough to glow). Some of that IR escapes into space– the resulting overall loss of energy has to balance the energy coming in from the sun to keep earth’s average temperature stable. If more energy comes in than goes out our planet get hotter. That is, we can’t have a stable average temperature on the surface unless the net energy escaping the earth is equal to the net energy coming in from the sun. If it takes longer for energy to escape (which is what happens when CO2 in the atmosphere increases) the total amount of heat energy in the earth system increases. Hence global warming. Every step in the story is supported by lab tests of what CO2 (and other GHGs) do when exposed to IR.
At this point all climate denying delayalists are psychopathic morons.
No such paper exists.
1856 Eunice Foote 1st demonstrated CO2’s heating experimentally, theorized GH effect
https://climatecrocks.com/2018/05/13/recognizing-the-mother-of-global-warming/
As you say, GHGs absorb AND EMIT IR. However, CO2 only absorbs materially in a very narrow band around 15 microns. Worse, water vapor also absorbs in this range, so where there’s material humidity CO2 is irrelevant as an IR absorber (the WV does the job). But the real problem with the ‘back-radiation ‘ thesis’ is that CO2 absorbed energy close to Earth’s surface is NOT reradiated, but rather absorbed energy is mostly conducted away by collisions with nearby [99% non-GHG, non-radiating] molecules. There are several orders of magnitude of such collisions in the time it would take for the IR excited CO2 to re-radiate, by which time the energy has already been ‘decanted.’ Where CO2 absorbed radiation does re-emit is close to the tropopause, say 5 miles up, where it’s about -80C. At this altitude any downward radiation will never make it back to the surface and the radiated up energy makes CO2 a coolant, transferring heat at the speed of light toward outer space.
Of course your above does not refute my observation that the ‘back-radiation’ thesis has never been experimentally demonstrated. Showing that CO2 absorbs IR is not sufficient.
Worst: you totally ignore that the warming happens first, then the rise in CO2, meaning: AGW contradicts causality itself. Causes don’t happen after effects. Duh.
It’s not a list of arguments (good or bad), but rather a list of the same conclusion from 5 different scientific papers.
wow.
2006 called – they want their BS climate denial talking point back.
Always interesting to me when a denier spouts something with absolute confidence, then when they’re refuted, say nothing.
First, I’m not going to take a cartoon as refutation of anything.
But more to the point, I cite 5 scientific studies in my above demonstrating that the warming in the modern period precedes the rise in CO2. I could have added a sixth, namely the IPCC AR4.
Moreover all of these studies (ex the AR4) are at least a decade newer than your cartoon.
You’re going to have to up your game.
I cite scientific papers. You cite a cartoon.
I really don’t see how almost 2 centuries could pass since Eunice Foote’s experiment and no one points out that it shows nothing about the GH Effect. Not only did she use sunlight to warm the various gases (which contain no CO2-resonant bandwidths), but also all she showed is that CO2 has a lower specific heat than all the other gases (again, nothing to do with the GH Effect).